Purpose – This paper aims to describe the process used to create an emotion lexicon enriched with the emotional intensity of words and focuses on improving the emotion analysis process in texts. Design/methodology/approach – The process includes setting, preparation and labelling stages. In the first stage, a lexicon is selected. It must include a translation to the target language and labelling according to Plutchik’s eight emotions. The second stage starts with the validation of the translations. Then, it is expanded with the synonyms of the emotion synsets of each word. In the labelling stage, the similarity of words is calculated and displayed using WordNet similarity. Findings – The authors’ approach shows better performance to identification of the predominant emotion for the selected corpus. The most relevant is the improvement obtained in the results of the emotion analysis in a hybrid approach compared to the results obtained in a purist approach. Research limitations/implications – The proposed lexicon can still be enriched by incorporating elements such as emojis, idioms and colloquial expressions. Practical implications – This work is part of a research project that aids in solving problems in a digital society, such as detecting cyberbullying, abusive language and gender violence in texts or exercising parental control. Detection of depressive states in young people and children is added. Originality/value – This semi-automatic process can be applied to any language to generate an emotion lexicon. This resource will be available in a software tool that implements a crowdsourcing strategy allowing the intensity to be re-labelled and new words to be automatically incorporated into the lexicon.